Even though Purim is over a week away, we baked three dozen hamentashen yesterday. I am not the kind of person who typically prepares for a holiday (or anything, for that matter) many days in advance. But we had good reason to open up shop early – Bubbe was here. My mother makes the world’s best hamentashen. Cookie dough, prune inside (don’t even talk to me about chocolate chips and jelly you PAGAN) and overflowing with gobs of filling – exactly the way her Bubbe made them.
I am not a wonderful baker, at least not when it comes to anything that requires a delicate hand and patience. Which means, my challah is pretty good and I can churn out a tasty apple crisp, but trying to roll dough and hand-shape triangles usually leads to unattractive results. Overflowing lumpy brown jam doesn’t improve the picture, if you get my drift. So yesterday, Bubbe and the girls did a little m’dor l’dor (generation to generation) while mommy took pictures. Since Jewish cooking is a major component of the curriculum for those of us who home-shul, I’m glad my girls had a proper teacher.
I forgot to take pictures of the fruits of their labor before I wrapped them and put them in the freezer, but I’ll post them when we make our mishloach manot.
And now, the secret recipe. This is how I wrote it down, about a million years ago.
Dough: 3 c flour / 2 eggs / 2 tsp baking powder / 1 stick butter / 1/2 tsp salt / 3/4 c sugar
Filling: 1 lb pitted prunes soaked overnight in water (about an inch higher than the prunes), cook with a little sugar and cinnamon until very soft. Squeeze in a little lemon.
Mix it all together. In a way that, you know, seems baker-y. Roll, cut and fill so they look like hamentashen. Hamayvin yavin.
Bake at 375 for 12-15 minutes, until lightly brown around the edges.
Thanks for the recipe, I can’t wait to try it. Love the name of the blog. At this point in our life we are home-shuling, too. I look forward to learning more about the Meltzer Method.
Ok so I actually mixed up and baked 3 different recipes’ worth of hamantashen this past week, so I could finally maybe settle on a single *best* one, but I think I will have to mix up one last batch using your recipe. I’ll admit it, I was born a pagan, and I was using seedless strawberry jam as my filling. I think some prune filling is in order. If I can escape my driveway before Purim, I might even go out and buy some bulk poppyseeds. The jam was just not working out.
One of the advantages of the the prune filling is that it’s really thick, so it doesn’t ooze out through the cracks.
What is almost as wonderful as baking hamantaschen with your grandaughters? Reading and qvelling over their mama’s blog.
Your blog inspired me to share a Purim memory and my own m’dor l’dor: Mom always made the best (of course) hamentaschen, so it was a real treat when I went off to college and she sent a shoebox-full to me, 600 miles away, at Purim (my dorm-mates thought so, too!). I have baked them each year with my son (who’s a whiz now at forming a shapley hamentaschen) since he was little. Now I plan to make them (a bit late, as the flu set us back) to send to, among others, my college nephew. He’s averse to fruit in any form (imagine?!), so I plan to try a poppy-seed/honey/walnut/cinnamon mixture as one of the fillings (prune’s my fav, too…tho’ doing the same with dried apricots also yields yummy results), as the only poppy-seed mune recipes I found had prunes, figs or raisins…
We make hamentashen each year and enjoy both traditional (poppy seed and apricot) fillings and more contemporary fillings like lemon curd, orange marmalade with dark chocolate, chocolate with candied ginger, chocolate with caramel, fig, rose petal jam.. really whatever we feel might taste yummy. We made a big batch last week… just to get in the spirit of things (and we were out of cookies) and will make some more the week before Purim.
For me, baking for the holidays, puts me in touch with my grandmother . I fondly remember her baking on the dinette table just of the kitchen in the house I grew up in on Long Island. The aroma of mandel bread, rugellach, and my favorite – her chocolate marble cake (more chocolate than vanilla) which has become my traditional birthday cake – as they come out of the oven are very powerful… These scents and tastes transport me back to my chlidhood home.
Reminds of when I was a freshman in college and my mom and gramma sent competing hamataschen packages to me. Gramma’s were the delicious yeast dough kind and mom’s delcious cookie dough. The fillings-traditional poppy seed and prune. Guess who ate both packages…(well my roommate and floor mates had a few). Guess who was up all night because that was a lot of prunes…. 🙂
I’ll make them next Sunday though. Prune. poppy, apricot/nut and a few chocolate chips for my pagan friends.
Mi sh’nichnas adar, marbim l’simcha-the one who enters the month of Adar is has much joy.
Happy Purim
We love any chag (holiday) that has cooking involved. I look forward to trying your recipe and trying to find out where your blog has gone since I see that I am reading 2009 stuff!
For Purim last year, after we made our Hamentaschen (sorry, we did the chocolate chip, strawberry jam thing cuz if the kids don’t end up eating these cookies, their mom will, and prunes/poppy seeds will not fly with my kids), my son put two circle-shaped dough pieces together next to eachother and I dubbed it “Haman’s Tushy”. He then did some creative and unrepeatable things with a lone brown chocolate chip on this Haman-tushy, which was funny enough to get its own photograph…
Thanks for a great blog. I’m really enjoying it! (Where are you posting now though??)
[…] little less than three years, I wrote my first blog post. It was my mother’s hamentashen recipe, otherwise known as the best hamentashen ever. Since […]
We are making the cookies, but they tend to open while baking. Do you have a remedy for this? Thank you.